In an interview with IMFnews, Millon said CMC now owns roughly $5 billion in MSRs, compared to just $1.5 billion a year earlier. “We’re buying rights from the members of our cooperative,” Million said.

A spokesman for Ocwen said the company did not like the way the IMFnews story was being “interpreted.” After the story was published early Friday afternoon, Ocwen’s share price began to rise and continued to increase Monday.

Among those buying into MI stocks is Paulson & Co., the legendary hedge fund that made $15 billion by shorting publicly traded subprime firms via the ABX Index in the run-up to the housing bust.

Overall, the group reported a 5.8 percent increase in total mortgage banking income – which for some firms includes activity not captured in either production or servicing – during the fourth quarter.

Banks and thrifts earned a hefty $5.292 billion on their mortgage-banking activities during the fourth quarter of 2013, boosting the year to one of the industry’s best in recent memory. Mortgage banking income reported by banks and thrifts rose 12.7 percent from the third to the fourth quarter of last year, according to a new analysis of call-report data by Inside Mortgage Trends. The fourth-quarter surge brought annual earnings from mortgage banking to $25.857 billion in 2013 ... [Includes one data chart]

With the Federal Reserve acquiring a significant portion of new agency MBS issuance, the aggregate MBS holdings of banks and thrifts continued to decline in late 2013, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside MBS & ABS. Commercial banks and savings institutions held a total of $1.507 trillion of residential MBS in portfolio as of the end of last year, newly-released call-report data reveal. That was down 0.4 percent from the end of the third quarter and marked the industry’s fifth consecutive quarterly decline. Bank and thrift MBS holdings fell...[Includes two data charts]

Last year’s steady decline in GSE refinance activity continued into 2014 and contributed to an overall dip in the volume of single-family mortgages securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. Fannie and Freddie issued $47.0 billion in single-family mortgage-backed securities in January, a 15.8 percent decline from December 2013 and a steeper 61.9 percent decrease from the same period a year ago.

Fed: G-Fee Hikes Would Have Minimal Impact on Agency Originations. Increases to guaranty fees under consideration by the Federal Housing Finance Agency would directly reduce the dollar volume of new agency originations by less than 1.0 percent, according to new research published by the Federal Reserve. In December, then-FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco announced a plan to increase the base g-fee for all new Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgages by 10 basis points, update the up-front g-fee grid and eliminate the upfront 25 basis point adverse market fee that has been assessed on all mortgages purchased by Fannie and Freddie since 2008.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have both rolled out limited-time offer incentive programs for real estate agents and homebuyers in a bid to move some of the GSEs’ real estate-owned properties.Freddie announced this week it will pay a $1,000 inducement to selling agents and a separate $500 bonus to listing agents when they sell a home through the company’s HomeSteps program.

Nearly half of all mortgage borrowers did not refinance their home loan during the period between 2009 and 2012, when mortgage interest rates declined steadily, according to a Fannie Mae survey. The government-sponsored enterprise found that 40 percent to 50 percent of borrowers, for some reason, did not take advantage of low interest rates to reduce their monthly mortgage payments through refinancing. To try to get at why borrowers don’t refinance when the opportunity seems ripe, Fannie economist ...